Tag: Student Loans

One student aid policy debate that pops up periodically around the world – most recently in the United Kingdom – is the question of interest rates. On the one hand, you have people who use a slightly medieval line of thought to claim that any interest on loans is a form of “profit” and hence verboten where students are concerned. On the other side, you have people who note that loan interest subsidies by definition only help people who have already “made it” to … [ Read More ]

No Ving Rhames/Pulp Fiction jokes (you were thinking it, you know you were). Just a couple of interesting tales from about the high middle ages to show that in fact there is almost no tale under the sun in higher education which isn’t seven or eight centuries old.

Student loans. Though the tradition of providing aid to worthy but needy students as a gift (i.e. bursaries) has a history almost as old as universities themselves, the concept of lending money to … [ Read More ]

A few months ago, someone asked me what I wanted to see in the budget. I said i) investment in aboriginal PSE, ii) system changes for the benefit of mature students and iii) changes to loan repayment (specifically, a reduction of the maximum loan payment from 20% of disposable income to 15%). To my great pleasure, the government came through on two of those wishes. But there is still a lot of work to do yet.

Readers may remember that about this time last year, I was giving the Government of New Brunswick a bit of stick for a botched student aid roll-out. Today I am pleased to give credit where it is due, and congratulate the folks in Fredericton for fixing the problem and developing a much better student aid system.

Let’s go back 12 months to pick up the story. In February 2016, the Ontario government had come up with a fabulous new system which … [ Read More ]

The last federal budget made one large signal improvement to student assistance: the abolition of the education tax credit, and the re-investment of that money into an improved Canada Student Grant. Less remarked upon was a promise to simplify need assessment. Now the details of that effort are emerging, and they are pretty interesting.

The change has to do with the student contribution rules. In the Canadian student aid system, various forms of student income and assets are considered “resources” … [ Read More ]

Barring some sort of catastrophe, it now seems pretty clear that Hillary Clinton will be the 45th President of the United States. There is a reasonable chance (51.6% in Monday’s FiveThirtyEight forecast) that the Democrats could regain the Senate and an outside chance that they could also regain the House. Those odds probably change a bit in the Democrats’ favour once some post-grope polls come out later this week, but the basic outline of a post-November 7 world – Hillary … [ Read More ]

You’ll remember a couple of weeks ago I took the Ontario NDP to task for an absurd meme about the provincial government “profiting” from student loans. But it occurred to me later than though there is no way the charge sticks against the provincial government, it arguably might about the federal government’s Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP), which both borrows more cheaply and lends more dearly than the provincial government. So I decided to find out.

The Ontario NDP have started down the road to madness on student aid. Someone needs to stop them.

Here’s the issue: the NDP have decided to promise to make all Ontario student loans interest-free. As a policy, this is pretty meh. It’s not the kind of policy that increases participation because students don’t really pay attention to loan interest, and it’s not going to make loans a whole lot more affordable because Ontario forgives most loans anyway (as a consequence something … [ Read More ]

(Warning to readers: today’s blog is a long read about student aid policy. Skip it if this kind of wonkery isn’t to your taste.)

Last week’s historic changes to the Canada Student Loans Program – which saw the elimination of the Education and Textbook Tax Credits, and an increase of 50% in Canada Student Grants – is a very complicated piece of policy to analyze. Remember that there is no new money in this set-up: any new money given to one set … [ Read More ]

Every once in awhile, someone important says that what Canada/America really needs are income-contingent loans. I usually reply, “we have income-contingent loans in Canada/America, that’s what the Repayment Assistance Program/Income Based Repayment program does”. To which the rejoinder is “no, no, that’s not income-contingent, what I mean by income-contingent is recovery of the loan is done automatically through the tax system, so you don’t run into all these messy issues around borrowers in repayment having not signed up for things”.